Revolutionary Road (3 page)

  "It's just that we never should've let you get mixed up in the damned thing, is all." With his free hand he opened his collar, both to cool his neck and to find reassurance in the grown-up, sophisticated feel of the silk tie and Oxford shirt. "I'd just like to get my hands on that what's his name, that's all. That director."

  "It wasn't his fault."

  "Well, the whole pack of them, then. God knows they all stank. The whole point is we should've known better in the first place.
I
should've known better, is what it amounts to. You never would've joined the damn group if the Campbells and I hadn't talked you into it. Remember when we first heard about it? And you said they'd probably turn out to be a bunch of idiots? Well, I should've listened to you, that's all."

  "All right. Could we sort of stop talking about it now?"

  "Sure we will." He tried to pat her thigh but it was out of reach across the wide seat. "Sure we will. I just don't want you feeling bad about it, that's all."

  With a confident, fluid grace he steered the car out of the bouncing side road and onto the hard clean straightaway of Route Twelve, feeling that his attitude was on solid ground at last. A refreshing wind rushed in to ruffle his short hair and cool his brains, and he began to see the fiasco of the Laurel Players in its true perspective. It simply wasn't worth feeling bad about. Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstance might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.

  And now, as it often did in the effort to remember who he was, his mind went back to the first few years after the war and to a crumbling block of Bethune Street, in that part of New York where the gentle western edge of the Village flakes off into silent waterfront warehouses, where the salt breeze of evening and the deep river horns of night enrich the air with a promise of voyages. In his very early twenties, wearing the proud mantles of "veteran" and "intellectual" as bravely as he wore his carefully aged tweed jacket and washed-out khakis, he had owned one of three keys to a one-room apartment on that street. The other two keys, and rights to "the use of the place" every second and third week, had belonged to two of his Columbia College classmates, each of whom paid a third of its twenty-seven-dollar rent. These other two, an ex-fighter pilot and an ex-marine, were older and more relaxed in their worldliness than Frank—they seemed able to draw on endless reserves of willing girls with whom to use the place—but it wasn't long before Frank, to his own shy amazement, began to catch up with them; that was a time of wondrously rapid catching-up in many ways, of dizzily mounting self-confidence. The solitary tracer of railroad maps had never hopped his freight, but it had begun to seem unlikely that any Krebs would ever call him a jerk again. The army had taken him at eighteen, had thrust him into the final spring offensive of the war in Germany and given him a confused but exhilarating tour of Europe for another year before it set him free, and life since then had carried him from strength to strength. Loose strands of his character—the very traits that had kept him dreaming and lonely among schoolboys and later among soldiers—these seemed suddenly to have coalesced into a substantial and attractive whole. For the first time in his life he was admired, and the fact that girls could actually want to go to bed with him was only slightly more remarkable than his other concurrent discovery— that men, and intelligent men at that, could actually want to listen to him talk. His marks at school were seldom better than average, but there was nothing average about his performance in the beery, all-night talks that had begun to form around him—talks that would often end in a general murmur of agreement, accompanied by a significant tapping of temples, that old Wheeler really had it. All he would ever need, it was said, was the time and the freedom to find himself. Various ultimate careers were predicted for him, the consensus being that his work would lie somewhere "in the humanities" if not precisely in the arts—it would, at any rate, be something that called for a long and steadfast dedication—and that it would involve his early and permanent withdrawal to Europe, which he often described as the only part of the world worth living in. And Frank himself, walking the streets at daybreak after some of those talks, or lying and thinking on Bethune Street on nights when he had the use of the place but had no girl to use it with, hardly ever entertained a doubt of his own exceptional merit. Weren't the biographies of all great men filled with this same kind of youthful groping, this same kind of rebellion against their fathers and their fathers' ways? He could even be grateful in a sense that he had no particular area of interest: in avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.

  But as college wore on he began to be haunted by numberless small depressions, and these tended to increase in the weeks after college was over, when the other two men had taken to using their keys less and less frequently and he was staying alone in the Bethune Street place, taking odd jobs to buy his food while he thought things out. It nagged him, in particular, that none of the girls he'd known so far had given him a sense of unalloyed triumph. One had been very pretty except for unpardonably thick ankles, and one had been intelligent, though possessed of an annoying tendency to mother him, but he had to admit that none had been first-rate. Nor was he ever in doubt of what he meant by a first-rate girl, though he'd never yet come close enough to one to touch her hand. There had been two or three of them in the various high schools he'd attended, disdainfully unaware of him in their concern with college boys from out of town; what few he'd seen in the army had most often been seen in flickering miniature, on strains of dance music, through the distant golden windows of an officers' club, and though he'd seen plenty of them since then, in New York, they had always been climbing in or out of taxicabs, followed by the grimly hovering presences of men who looked as if they'd never been boys at all.

  Why not let well enough alone? As an intense, nicotinestained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man, wasn't it simple logic to expect that he'd be limited to intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sorts of women? But this was the counsel of defeat, and one night, bolstered by four straight gulps of whiskey at a party in Morningside Heights, he followed the counsel of victory. "I guess I didn't get your name," he said to the exceptionally first-rate girl whose shining hair and splendid legs had drawn him halfway across a roomful of strangers. "Are you Pamela?"

  "No," she said. "That's Pamela over there. I'm April. April Johnson."

  Within five minutes he found he could make April Johnson laugh, that he could not only hold the steady attention of her wide gray eyes but could make their pupils dart up and down and around in little arcs while he talked to her, as if the very shape and texture of his face were matters of absorbing interest.

  "What do you do?"

  "I'm a longshoreman."

  "No, I mean really."

  "I mean really too." And he would have showed her his palms to prove it if he hadn't been afraid she could tell the difference between calluses and blisters. For the past week, under the guidance of a roughhewn college friend, he had been self-consciously "shaping up" on the docks each morning and swaying under the weight of fruit crates. "Starting Monday, though, I've got a better job. Night cashier in a cafeteria."

  "Well but I don't mean things like that. I mean what are you really interested in?"

  "Honey—" (and he was still young enough so that the audacity of saying "Honey" on such short acquaintance made him blush) "—Honey, if I had the answer to that one I bet I'd bore us both to death in half an hour."

  Five minutes later, dancing, he found that the small of April Johnson's back rode as neatly in his hand as if it had been made for that purpose; and a week after that, almost to the day, she was lying miraculously nude beside him in the first blue light of day on Bethune Street, drawing her delicate forefinger down his face from brow to chin and whispering: "It's true, Frank. I mean it. You're the most interesting person I've ever met."

  "Because it's just not worth it," he was saying now, allowing the blue-lit needle of the speedometer to tremble up through sixty for the final mile of highway. They were almost home. They would have a few drinks and maybe she would cry a little—it would do her good—and then they would laugh about it and shut themselves in the bedroom and take off their clothes, and in the moonlight her plump little breasts would nod and sway and point at him, and there wasn't any reason why it couldn't be like the old days.

  "I mean it's bad enough having to
live
among all these damn little suburban types—and I'm including the Campbells in that, let's be honest—it's bad enough having to
live
among these people, without letting ourselves get hurt by every little half-assed—what'd you say?" He glanced briefly away from the road and was startled to see, by the light of the dashboard, that she was covering her face with both hands.

  "I said
yes.
All
right,
Frank. Could you just please stop talking now, before you drive me crazy?"

  He slowed down quickly and brought the car to a sandy halt on the shoulder of the road, cutting the engine and the lights. Then he slid across the seat and tried to take her in his arms.

  "No, Frank, please don't do that. Just leave me alone, okay?"

"Baby, it's only that I want to—"

"Leave me alone. Leave me
alone
!"

  He drew himself back to the wheel and put the lights on, but his hands refused to undertake the job of starting the car. Instead he sat there for a minute, listening to the beating of blood in his eardrums.

  "It strikes me," he said at last, "that there's a considerable amount of bullshit going on here. I mean you seem to be doing a pretty good imitation of Madame Bovary here, and there's one or two points I'd like to clear up. Number one, it's not my fault the play was lousy. Number two, it's sure as hell not my fault you didn't turn out to be an actress, and the sooner you get over
that
little piece of soap opera the better off we're all going to be. Number three, I don't happen to fit the role of dumb, insensitive suburban husband; you've been trying to hang that one on me ever since we moved
out
here, and I'm damned if I'll wear it. Number four—"

  She was out of the car and running away in the headlights, quick and graceful, a little too wide in the hips. For a second, as he clambered out and started after her, he thought she meant to kill herself—she was capable of damn near anything at times like this—but she stopped in the dark roadside weeds thirty yards ahead, beside a luminous sign that read no passing. He came up behind her and stood uncertainly, breathing hard, keeping his distance. She wasn't crying; she was only standing there, with her back to him.

  "What the hell," he said. "What the hell's this all about? Come on back to the car."

  "No. I will in a minute. Just let me stand here a minute, all right?"

  His arms flapped and fell; then, as the sound and the lights of an approaching car came up behind them, he put one hand in his pocket and assumed a conversational slouch for the sake of appearances. The car overtook them, lighting up the sign and the tense shape of her back; then its taillights sped away and the drone of its tires flattened out to a buzz in the distance, and finally to silence. On their right, in a black marsh, the spring peepers were in full and desperate song. Straight ahead, two or three hundred yards away, the earth rose high above the moonlit telephone wires to form the mound of Revolutionary Hill, along whose summit winked the friendly picture windows of the Revolutionary Hill Estates. The Campbells lived in one of those houses; the Campbells might well be in one of the cars whose lights were coming up behind them right now.

  "April?"

  She didn't answer.

  "Look," he said. "Couldn't we sit in the car and talk about it? Instead of running all over Route Twelve?"

  "Haven't I made it clear," she said, "that I don't particularly want to talk about it?"

  
"Okay,"
he said. "
Okay.
Jesus, April, I'm trying as hard as I can to be nice about this thing, but I—"

  "How kind of you," she said. "How terribly, terribly kind of you."

  "W
ait
a minute—" he pulled the hand from his pocket and stood straight, but then he put it back because other cars were coming. "Listen a minute." He tried to swallow but his throat was very dry. "I don't know what you're trying to prove here," he said, "and frankly I don't think you do either. But I do know one thing. I know damn well I don't deserve this."

  "You're always so wonderfully definite, aren't you," she said, "on the subject of what you do and don't deserve." She swept past him and walked back to the car.

  "Now,
wait
a minute!" He was stumbling after her in the weeds. Other cars were rushing past now, both ways, but he'd stopped caring. "W
ait
a minute, God damn it!"

  She leaned the backs of her thighs against the fender and folded her arms in an elaborate display of resignation while he jabbed and shook a forefinger in her face.

  "You listen to me. This is one time you're not going to get away with twisting everything I say. This just happens to be
one
damn time I
know
I'm not in the wrong. You know what you are when you're like this?"

  "Oh God, if only you'd stayed home tonight."

  "You know what you are when you're like this? You're sick. I really mean that."

  "And do you know what you are?" Her eyes raked him up and down. "You're disgusting."